


All the Marbles

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Memory Related, One Shot, Platonic Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Relationships, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 11:33:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17866475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts





	All the Marbles

Some time after Caleb spilled the truth about his scars, after The Mighty Nein descended into the tunnel and came out somewhere in Xhorhas, Beau offered to wrap his arms like hers.

To persuade him, she flexed.

“C’mon, you’ll love it. You’ll look mysterious and tough,” she said, “instead of all wounded and shit.”

Having quietly admired the simple, spiraling beauty of Beau’s monk-style wraps, he agreed.

By then, he was adjusting to the persistence of tenderness around him, and the diminishment of his darkness. And by then, what did it matter that he might feel naked during the changing of his bandages? By then, baring one’s emotional fissures to the group was just. . .Tuesday.

Nott. Fjord and Jester. Beau and Yasha. Caduceus. Mollymauk. He had seen them divested of every protective layer.

They had seen him in states beyond nudity, blistered to his core by fear. And they wanted him anyway.

Beau hadn’t enough fabric to make Caleb a matching pair of wraps, so Jester offered a strip of green wool, cut from the lining of her cloak. To this, Caduceus tied a scrap of his jade silk. Yasha produced a length of linen, a violet damask, sketched through with crimson thread. She disappeared into the night before they could ask where it’d come from.

“I don’t have any fancy cloth,” said Nott, fingering her own threadbare bandages. “Buttons. I’m lousy with buttons, so-”

“It’s okay,” he said, because they were speaking again, and that was worth more than the brightest button.

As the Nein slept under Caleb’s sheltering dome, he and Beau took first watch. She sat cross-legged beside him, unwinding the fabric and inspecting it by the light of the magic globe.

It was too bright. He muttered at the globe, fussing with the rag that kept slipping off before rolling his shirtsleeves to his shoulders. He was untangling his left arm from his old bandages when Beau suddenly clamped down on his knee.

“Holy shit. I just realized something.”

Caleb froze with the wad of sweaty muslin in one hand.

“Yes?”

“Your memory thing. You’re never going to forget these.”

He glanced down, panicked, unsure what she meant. She was focused on his scars, her eyes so wide with discovery that, for a moment, he feared that the crystals had grown back. But the skin was as he remembered. Painfully slow to heal, but healing nonetheless. Caleb exhaled.

“Ah. No. Probably not,” he said, unwinding the bandages from his right arm. “Perfect memory means, well, it means everything. Perfect cares nothing for good or bad.”

His sleeve kept unrolling. Using a clothespin, long-ago borrowed from Fjord, Caleb fastened his bunched sleeve to his collar placket. As Beau began planning how and where to wrap his arms, she dove back into the subject of his memory.

“It’s just. I fight _a lot_. I take _a lot_ of hits,” she said.

Caleb quirked his head.

“Are you trying to impress me? This is maybe the, um, opening act to the gun show?”

Her mouth twisted up. Caleb’s smirk became an unsuppressed chuckle.

“Shut up, man.” Beau shushed him, casting a guilty look around the dome. But their friends remained asleep.

When he swiveled back to Beau, he found her smoothing the strip of damask. As with the majority of her serious thoughts, this one began with a shrug.

“Cuts, bruises, scars. After so many years of damage, I lost track of that shit. I’ve _forgotten_ more scars than you’ll ever have.” She gestured at his arm with the end of the purple fabric. “But you won’t get to do that with these. Ever.”

Would the stag forget his horns? The solitaire its song? At the moment of his demise, might the dog forget his chain? Caleb shook his head.

“Ja, well. It is a rare gift, rare and valuable. You always pay for valuable.”

Beau was waiting for his permission, so Caleb held out his left arm and she proceeded. She crossed his palm with the tail end, bringing it between his first and second fingers. Caleb held his forearm rigid for her.

“I know all the facts and moments, which is nice. Every book. Every person, that can be a, well, it’s a mixed bag.” Useful spells, hurtful letters, every single syllable. Caleb blinked down at the pleating fabric. “I remember every casual act of savagery, too. Evils so horrible they should have locks on them.”

“I’m sorry. Seriously, that sucks,” Beau said, not looking up as she progressed toward his elbow.

“It’s okay. I’m not cowering from it anymore. Well, not much.” He shrugged and tapped his head with his right hand. “I’m learning to make more space, up here, for better things.”

A comfortable silence extended beneath the hazy globe light. It lulled Caleb, kept him from shuddering too badly from the prolonged contact. But before long, Beau steered him back to talking.

“What’s it like?”

“Hmm?”

“Perfect memory.”

A common question. Still, a perfect reply eluded him. He hadn’t been allowed much poetry in his life.

“Like running downhill,” he said, “backward.”

Beau gave an approving grunt.

“At least something’s perfect around here.”

“What do you mean?”

“As much as we’ve been exposing ourselves to each other lately, you’d think we’d feel more, I don’t know, free. _Absolved_ ,” she said with a shake of her head. She tied off the forearm wrap, carefully cut the strip, and began again above Caleb’s elbow. “What’s the fuckin point of all this honesty if we don’t get to be, you know. . .”

“Shameless,” said Caleb. A whisper of a word, yet it conjured to mind a face that would--forever it seemed--stand as definition.

The wrap loosened in Beau’s fingers, her eyes drifted. Undoubtedly, she saw Molly in her own mind. A lavender fool grinning through a mist of blood.

“Shamelessness,” she determined with a nod, “is an element we’re sorely missing.”

Then, her fingers were flying around his arm, again.

She performed this ritual as she did everything else: With hostile perfectionism. The wrap bound him securely, but not painfully, allowing Caleb to marvel at her precision. She never aggravated his tortured skin. Instead of tugging or wrenching, she thumbed the cloth into submission, molding it like wet clay, until it clasped Caleb’s bicep in a perfect spiral of purple.

When a scant tail of cloth remained, she pulled it through the bound loop she’d made for it at the start, then tugged the loop tight using its free end. With a little tucking, all the frayed ends disappeared from sight.

Gone, as well, was any doubt as to the origin of the violet damask.

“I miss him, too.” Caleb held his arm to the light, exposing the red story woven in the field of purple. “He once said that shame was like a marble. It was during-”

“How is shame like a marble? You throw it under people’s feet, or what?”

“Please, let me tell it. I am impressing you with my memory, Beauregard,” Caleb said, attempting a stern voice. He held up his arms--one bare and scarred, the other adorned in majestic purple--and flexed. “ _Willkommen in der Waffenausstellung_.”

She was only half-sure of the joke, until he posed, then she had to turn away or suffer fits of laughter that would wake half of Xhorhas. Dome or no dome. Caleb rubbed the uncertain stubble along his jaw, stifling a giggle himself.

“A shopping trip,” he said, clearing his throat, “Nothing special, an ordinary chore for ordinary things, but I remember it down to the last detail.”

“The only thing as boring to remember as it is to do: Shopping.”

He didn’t disagree. But, he hoped Beau might think him capable and wise; Always pulling the right book from the shelf at the right time. His lips twitched and his eyes closed.

“Mhm. We go together, all of us with our lists and our grievances. The day is a little warm and I sweat, but I keep my coat. I enjoy Pumat Sol’s shop. It’s. . .it’s.”

He melted into memory by way of the senses first, which were old and powerful and required no language.

“ _Geborgenheit_ ,” he said.

“Ga-huh?”

He could not explain it to Beau. Not to anyone who lacked the longing that had shaped his people. Despair often stole the precise meaning from Caleb himself. But nevermind. Fjord was a demi-god, Nott was a mother, Yasha was a killer. Like those, _geborgenheit_ was more than the word, so a person could find it no matter the condition of their tongue.

“Sol’s shop is awash in a kindness of light,” he began again, “every corner soft and inviting. There, paper the color of winter cream. There, ink pots in blue-black stacks.”

Caleb opened his eyes to find that Beau had shuffled to his other side. She worked with practiced intent, and the patched green fabric began to climb Caleb’s right arm. Her expression was open and calm; Though she worked, she was also waiting for him to go on, to lead.

“Nott fights with the new string on her mask. She is upset because it sags. People will see,” said Caleb, clearing his throat again.

So many colorful curses she thought he hadn’t heard. He smiled.

“Mhm. Where am I?” Beau said.

“You walk ahead of us, with Yasha. She is the only one who matches your stride,” replied Caleb, remembering the bob of shoulders in front of him. The scent of leather, old and new. The ozone-tang of enchantment drifting from behind Pumat Prime’s curtain. “Fjord hangs a step back, so you, so we, don’t see the way he runs his tongue along his gums.”

Fjord had shaken it off before anyone anyone noticed.

Almost anyone.

“Was he still doing that?”

Caleb cracked an eye open.

“We were all still doing that,” he said. Beau shrugged and he continued. “I look at everything in the shop with such bitterness. Every price tag reminds me that not so long ago I had all of this at my fingertips.”

Beau reached Caleb’s elbow with the forest-green wool, her bruised knuckles skillfully avoiding the worst of his scars.

“And Jester, she puts on a bubbly face. Shopping is fun. It’s all. . .it’s all donuts and dicks.” Caleb swallowed the tickle of laughter before it grew into a ball of thorns. “But Molly knows. We all know. But Molly knows her best at this point. She hasn’t got two silver to rub together.”

Caleb paused to watch Beau coil the silk around his upper arm, jade-green rising above his bicep.

He spared her his perfect description. How Jester’s face had twitched with misery, as if she was being mocked by an unseen demon: _This is the world, little girl. Mama never told you_. Followed by the sneering rustle of a coinless purse.

“So, Molly takes her empty hand in both of his,” said Caleb, “and he says the following.”

“Wait, are you about to repeat it _all_ ,” Beau interjected, “like, word for word?”

“This is the whole point of perfect memory, yes?”

“Cool. Cool.”

Beau resumed smoothing and looping, and Caleb summoned as much of Mollymauk as could be managed without a true spell.

“My dear, at some point in our lives, probably much too early, someone gives us a great big ugly rock to carry around. That’s shame,” he said. “Once you have it, it’s like the Old Maid with the clap: Hard to get rid of.”

Beau snorted loudly, then covered her mouth. Behind Caleb, Nott grumbled and flopped over in her sleep.

“But I’ll tell you a secret,” Caleb went on, trying on Molly’s wicked smile. “You have the power to shape that hunk of stone into a treasure.”

He glanced across the dome, seeking out the sleeping shape of Jester. She was curled away from the light of the globe, but Caleb could make out the dried blood that had newly stained her dress.

“Take a hammer to that ugly rock, and smack off the pieces that other people point at,” he said, encouraged by Beau’s aggressive head-bob. “Flake off the bits that are the mistakes you made. Cram a chisel in each crack about who you are, and sand off the things you can’t control.”

“Fuck yeah,” Beau whispered vehemently at the cloth tail as she ran it through its loop.

A tiny wellspring of tears stung Caleb’s eyes.

“Then, if you tumble that lump of shame until it’s smooth and round, eventually the light will pass through. You’ll start to see such interesting shapes, darling.” He dipped his head at Beau until she looked up from the wrap. Her eyes, too, were bright with tears. She held onto his arm, though the work was done. “What’s left of that ugly rock then, hmm? What’s left of shame? A bauble. A marble. A curiosity small enough to cover with the palm of a hand.”

“Shame is a marble,” Beau repeated, exactly as Caleb himself had.

Caleb leaned back, honoring Molly’s theatricality as he swirled one hand out to each side.

“Easily kept, and easily lost.”

Beau grinned.

“Easily kicked under the furniture and forgotten,” she added.

He nodded, struck by the word and the silence that bloomed after it.

Thankfully, Beau was immune to melancholy. She chucked Caleb gently on the shoulder, and he became himself again, blinking into the now.

“Ja. Exactly so,” he said, sucking a breath. He traced cold fingers over the fabric that hugged his arms, which looked. . .not _tough_ , like her, but certainly far from wounded. How right she’d been. The world was truly upside down. “Thank you, Beauregard. For these.”

A deep-woods green crept up beneath that of spring. A curl of purple shimmied to red.

“Gesundheit,” said Beau.

For so delightfully, tenderly misusing the phrase, for guiding the wrong all the way around to right, Caleb beamed at her.

 

 


End file.
